


How to Save the World in 8 Minutes and 3 Seconds

by BalloonArcade



Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Aliens on the internet, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-14 14:22:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28922019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BalloonArcade/pseuds/BalloonArcade
Summary: While a team of Autobots engage in battle on a newly arrived Decepticon Solar Harvester: Prowl, co-ordinating the battle from the Ark on Earth, has had all his mission communications updates blocked by Soundwave - all, except Sideswipe and Sunstreaker's social media accounts.
Relationships: Sideswipe & Sunstreaker (Transformers)
Comments: 30
Kudos: 108





	How to Save the World in 8 Minutes and 3 Seconds

It started with a tweet.

Prowl had subscribed to all Sideswipe’s innumerable accounts, and while he doubted he had gotten them all, his main account — linked to Sideswipe’s Totally Awesome and Entirely Dangerous Stunts YouTube channel he ran with Rewind — had the most followers.

It wasn’t the strangest thing Prowl had ever seen him tweet (his ever-changing Twitter name attested to that.) Humans world-wide loved the engagement from an alien robot that never slept. For some reason, they found his more glitched behaviour #relatable or more baffling, a quote unquote: Mood. And it was just as well because Sideswipe’s Accidental Internet Entertainment Empire Inc. had begun to net the Autobots a considerable amount of revenue.

Except, this specific tweet came at a very bad time.

Prowl knew, for a fact, that right now Sideswipe was near the planet the humans called Mercury, and part of the team working to stop the Decepticon’s Solar Harvester from consuming the Earth’s star.

Not even a fraction of a second had passed from the notification of Sideswipe’s tweet appearing on his HUD, before Prowl was frantically cross-referencing Sunstreaker’s Instagram.

The most recent post: a photo of Sunstreaker pausing mid-battle, posing against the cybersteel glass window, a bright white flare in the background. 

The caption:

Prowl’s sparkrate sky-rocketed as he released some of the safety controls in his processor, accessing his battle computer.

How Sideswipe and Sunstreaker had managed to keep their access to the Earth’s datanet, while in Mercury’s orbit — when communications with the team went dark hours ago — didn’t matter. And Prowl didn’t think for a second that Sideswipe was intentionally finding a channel to communicate the Earth’s impending death to Prowl.

He was genuinely asking his followers for suggestions, to cover his obvious fuck-up of triggering the full coronal-flare mass ejection event: destabilizing the Sun.

Eight minutes and three seconds — minus the seconds it took for Sideswipe’s transmission to reach Earth’s Internet — was all the warning Prowl had to make preparations to save as many humans as possible.

With the controls and safeties released, Prowl’s battle computer projected out a processor-ache inducing amount of variables.

The moment the sun’s rays stopped hitting the surface of the planet: the majority of photosynthesis planet-wide would cease. The essential phytoplankton, which generated the majority of the world’s oxygen, would perish. It would take approximately 100 years for all trees in cold climates to use up their sap stores, and die. 

The atmosphere would keep the Earth warm enough for survival for those who had the proper cold-climate gear, for approximately 48 hours.

Then, the surface of the oceans would start to freeze, though after a point, the ice on the surface would shelter the oceans from a complete and total deep freeze.

And Prowl had his first solution.

Theoretically, some humans could survive beneath the ice on nuclear submarines. Prowl coordinated an order to world leaders to prepare to evacuate essential personnel. Those with exceptional talents and the psychological resilience with an aptitude to living and working co-operatively in cramped, closed quarters, to any nuclear submarine who could reach land in two days. His battle-net became a flurry of activity within 30 seconds. World leaders, or their aids, demanding explanations, each response wasting more and more precious time as minutes ticked by.

Prowl pushed away the results that said his solution would not be executed correctly. The humans leaders would panic and fill the submarines with their own kin and the privileged class, regardless of strategy involved in prioritizing their species survival.

At the same time, Sideswipe posted another tweet.

Three minutes had past.

Prowl filtered it out as background noise. As he explored a multi-faceted survival approach. Geothermal vents leading to the Earth’s molten iron core. They were humanity’s greatest hope for survival as a species: they could cluster around them, consuming preserved food stuffs the Autobots could scavenge for them, until the Autobots could find a suitable-enough new world for them to inhabit.

A second later, Prowl had made an offer on all available land for sale in the country known as Iceland.

  


Presuming, of course, the Autobots in orbit could manage to find the new coordinates of Earth — without the sun’s gravity, the Earth would be ejected from orbit — Prowl’s remaining Earth forces would be down to a skeleton crew.

Primus help them all.

With only a minute remaining, a capacitor in Prowl’s cortex blew. Smoke started pouring out of the back of his helm. At this point, all he could do was watch as he was forced to continue to interface with his orders manually on the computer terminal before him.

The clock counted down.

Forty-five seconds.

Thirty.

Another tweet.

Twenty-three.

With twenty-two seconds remaining, Sideswipe posted a tweet that would go into Cybertronian history as the moment the humans never understood how close they had come to a major extinction event.

  


* * *

  


Perceptor stated that, by all his calculations, reversing the Solar Harvester’s polarity shouldn’t have worked. Wheeljack and Brainstorm — always excited about the possibilities of quantum leap solutions to even the most benign problems like losing a pencil — postulated that Sideswipe had time travelled, or the multi-verse was involved.

As the science team in the Medbay descended into bickering what a “group of Sideswipes” would be called — and with Sunstreaker’s Instagram Poll leading the way with a group of Sideswipes being call ‘an annoyance of Sideswipes’ —

Sideswipe for his part sat across from Prowl, watching as Ratchet removed the fried components of Prowl’s battle computer: smiling at Prowl like it had all just been a grand adventure.

“You know, Sir? It’s kinda nice to see you spent eight minutes and three seconds experiencing what life has felt like for Sunny and me. I think you’ve grown as a Commander.”

He pat Prowl’s immobilized leg, his EM field pulsing with a new-found respect.

Prowl managed to find the pathways to form words, even if his vocalizer spit static as he spoke. “How did you do it?”

Sideswipe locked his optics with Ratchet behind Prowl, and bit his lower lip. “Maybe… don’t think about it, Sir, or you might fry what’s left of your battle computer.”

_“How?”_

Sideswipe shrugged. “My stubbornness? Sunny’s ego that says he’ll win? An excuse to use my pile-drivers? We’ve been racing clocks our entire lives as we fight for survival. We just never give up, even after the clock has hit zero.”

Prowl never learned what precisely Sideswipe had done up there to reverse the Solar Harvester’s polarity.

And Sunstreaker’s report held little insight as he so elegantly explained everything he thought Prowl needed to know.

“I realized I’d lose all my followers on Instagram, so I combined forces with my dumbass and we devised a plan to make the Decepticon Star-Eatting Ship vomit back out the sun.”

**Author's Note:**

> "Bro, did you know humans can't survive without their sun?"
> 
> Sunstreaker thought for a minute as he watched the little hearts from his instagram float up in the corner of his HUD display. His hands clenched into fists. 
> 
> "We're getting that sun back."
> 
> \-----------  
> Anyway, I found this half-finished one shot on my computer this morning and it made me laugh so hard, I cried. Not the updates I want to be focusing on, but hope it entertained.


End file.
